Brother DCP-J562DW: effective but poorly thought out

Ergonomics

Like many of its stooges, the DCP-J562DW opts for a sober look and the omnipresence of black. It is essentially made of a matt plastic which seems rather not very solid, in particular at the level of hinges. Access to the cartridges is however very simple, via a hatch on the front.

They are easily installed and removed. There is also a fairly small color touch screen at the front (6.8 cm diagonal) and not necessarily very responsive. Navigating through the menus remains fairly simple, however, and you can access the main functions (copier, scanner, settings, etc.) in a few seconds.

The loading bin is, however, much more open to criticism. You have to take it out almost completely and lift the upper part to slide conventional paper or photo paper, which is far from practical. The capacity is also not very high and does not exceed 100 pages for conventional paper.

We also have regularly noticed problems with paper jams or even a lack of detection of photo paper in the top tray. Worse: the use of the top tray, dedicated to the photo, requires hazardous handling, which completely blocks the bottom paper tray.

On the connection side, we regret the absence of a USB port for direct printing, as well as the strange location of the USB socket, hidden under the hood. It is therefore necessary to pass the cable through a groove provided for this purpose, which has the consequence of shortening its length accordingly.

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Office

The Brother DCP-J562DW printer does well in office applications. The printing speed measured during our test is even higher than that announced on the manufacturer's site, since we reach 15.4 pages / minute in black and white, and 8.7 pages / minute in color.

The print quality of texts or graphics is also there and we benefit from a good level of details and very visible gradients.

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Photo

Brother has never specialized in photography and it is not the DCP-J562DW that will change the situation. The results are not catastrophic, however, but far from those offered by the competition, including the Canon Pixma. The printing time is thus quite long: 38 seconds for a print on 10x15 cm photo paper, and especially 5 min 04 s for a print in A4 format.

The quality is generally fairly average. The black and white prints are correct and the drops remain invisible to the naked eye, but the color version is far from being faithful. We thus measured a delta E - difference between ideal colors and printed colors - to 11, while it takes less than 3 to reproduce colors perfect to the eye.

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Scanner and copies

The scanner built into the Brother DCP-J562DW scans up to 1200 dpi. Its speed is in the good average, since it takes care of a color page in 12 seconds (100 dpi), and 22 s for a photo in 10x15 format (300 dpi). Scanning can be started using the Brother tool from the computer, or directly from the machine's touch screen.

In copy, count 16 seconds for a black and white page and 30 seconds in color. Quite bad figures, and far behind other models. The quality of the copy is good, however, and very close to the original document.

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Consumption and noise

Whatever the use, the noise emitted by the DCP-J562DW is very contained. We have indeed measured an average of 43 dB for printing an office document and 41 dB for photo printing. It also consumes very little energy: 0.4 W in standby and 10 W during photo printing.

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Cost per page

With a cost per page of 10.3 cents / page (XL version of the manufacturer's brand cartridges), the Brother DCP-J562DW is slightly above the average observed in 2013 (9 cents / page). This price is however down compared to that of the DCP-J752DW tested a little more than 2 years ago, which displayed a cost per page of 11.2 cents.

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Conclusion

The Brother DPC-J562DW could have obtained 4 stars, but is unfortunately weighed down by questionable ergonomics and a too fair finish. The lack of practicality of the loading tray and the materials used are real faults, somewhat offset by a fairly fast print speed and a rather good office quality.

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